MMmm

I want some purple throat potion, or Dr. Phineas Prescott’s Patented Guaranteed Cure-All Pain Reducing Powdered Fizzy Water Supplements.

Someone mentioned a virus to me that affects wasps. It encrypts the DNA in their semen…however, if the female wasp is also a host to the virus, it decrypts the semen and allows reproduction to occur.

The stuff is bacteria of genus Wolbachia. To quote a scientific article…”Wolbachia are cytoplasmically inherited bacteria found in many arthropods. They induce various reproductive alterations in their hosts, including cytoplasmic incompatibility, thelytokous parthenogenesis, feminization and male-killing.”

Some explanation:

cytoplasmically inherited: this means that children are automatically infected, because the bacteria live inside the cells.

cytoplasmic incompatibility: Infected individuals will only produce offspring with other infected individuals. Or in most insects, infected females can mate with everyone to produce offspring, but infected males will not produce offspring with uninfected females (“everyday there is more of them, and less of us….”)

Mother………………Father……………….Children
Infected…………….clean…………………infected
Infected…………….infected…………….infected
Clean………………..clean…………………..clean
Clean………………… infected…………….dead

The mechanism is also called “kamikaze sperm”, because it kills all fertilized eggs in the uninfected female, even those already fertilized by uninfected males!

thelytokous parthenogenesis: A female can produce other females from unfertilized eggs. These females are clones of the mother. arrhenotokous parthenogenesis means that males are produced from unfertilized eggs.

feminization: pretty clear, males turning into females.

male-killing: use your imagination. Actually, I think it means that male offspring of an infected mother die in the womb.

Scary stuff. I wonder if I could work that into a story for the future, as a ‘people virus’.

A strain infecting humans would definitly be a very fun device. The fact that Wolbachia is a bacteria means that it is susceptible to antibiotics and heat. Parthenogenous wasps held at high temperatures or given antibiotics will suddenly produce male children.

A fascinating subject.

Next thought: how parasitoids eat their victims from within and influence their behavior. Isn’t entomology fun?